Floor maintenance machines are well known in the industry and are used for cleaning floors as by scrubbing. Examples of such machines are available from Clarke and Nilfisk-Advance. The maintenance machines generally include a tank for a cleaning solution, a cleaning device which may be an orbitally moving or rotating brush or scrubbing pad mounted on an assembly for moving the machine about a floor. The brush or pad may move about a vertical or horizontal axis. A power drive device may be provided to propel the maintenance machine while cleaning fluid solution is dispensed onto the floor adjacent the cleaning device. The cleaning solution may be removed from the floor with a recovery system that can include a squeegee and vacuum that will move recovered cleaning solution to a storage tank for later disposal. Such machines can either be a walk behind or riding type machine and can clean a path typically about 15 inches to about 48 inches wide. The walk behind machines may be a push type or a driven type as is well known in the art.
One of the issues with such machines is the uniform dispensing of cleaning fluid onto the floor. This can be both by the rate of dispensing and by the ratio of cleaning chemicals to water. The cleaning solution formed by the combination water (a typical bulk diluting fluid) and cleaning chemicals and can be either a liquid and/or foam. One early solution to the ratio of water to cleaning chemicals, was the use of a pre-mix. However, this was expensive since water had to be shipped while water was locally available and it did not allow for easy customization of the cleaning fluid for a particular job. One solution to this latter problem is mixing the water of the cleaning solution with the chemicals of the cleaning solution on site. However, this can be problematic because of the skill level of the machine operators plus, once mixed, the ratios may not be changed easily when in the storage tanks on the maintenance machine to change cleaning solutions though requires emptying of the storage tank. Another solution to the problem is to mix the water and chemicals together on the cleaning machine by introducing the chemicals into the water prior to dispensing to the floor to be cleaned.
There is thus a need, for an improved floor maintenance machine that will allow mixing of the cleaning bulk liquid and concentrated chemicals on the maintenance machine during operation thereof to provide accurate control of the final ratio of water to added cleaning chemicals and the rate of dispensing to the floor.